With demands for downsizing and high speed processes, a conventional image forming apparatus, such as a printing device, a copy machine, a facsimile machine and the like, that forms an image using an electrographic process, includes a photosensitive drum and performs printing by repeating, as an image forming process, a charging process by which a surface of the photosensitive drum is uniformly charged by a charge device, an exposure process by which the charged surface of the photosensitive drum is exposed by an exposure device to form an electrostatic latent image, a development process by which the formed electrostatic latent image is developed by a development device to form a toner image, and a transfer process by which the developed toner image is transferred to a transferred material, such as a sheet, by a transfer device.
In such an image forming process, to prevent an image defect due to a ghost formed by a potential difference at exposed parts and non-exposed parts on the surface of the photosensitive drum, a discharging light device that has a light source, such as a light emitting diode (LED) and the like, is arranged between the transfer device and the charge device to perform a discharging process by which the electric potential on the photosensitive drum is removed by irradiating the discharging light prior to the charging process. (See, for example, JP Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2005-208223 (Paragraphs [0013]-[0029] and FIGS. 1 and 2)
However, image quality is degraded if the photosensitive drum is not sufficiently discharged prior to the discharging process.
An object of the detailed examples disclosed in the present invention is to improve the above-described image quality.